We had a full staff meeting today at Zend - all of us, from all over the world, connected by long-distance telephone, a common purpose, and the sound of a small child making a lot of noise. Of course we all denied having any children on the spot, but it was funniest hearing the Israeli office in full flow. (C'mon Amnon, we all know it was you!)
'Course I got homesick - for about the first 40 minutes, anyway. After that I remembered how non-virtual staff meetings always go on for at least half an hour longer than my attention span can manage, and practiced throwing paper aeroplanes at myself in the hallway alone at home.
Still it seemed strangely quiet when the meeting was over, and I couldn't settle back to work for a while.
England's becoming more itself again (to me), if still aggressive. I got a fulsome apology and part of my bar bill paid by the guy who was so obnoxious the other night; that's something to hold onto I guess. My second best friend's going through a rough patch - no work, no car, no money - and can't come over to visit, although we plan to party like crazy when my paycheque comes. My best friend of all is in Ireland practising being a husband - no point there, I know he'll either be very good or very bad at it, there'll be nothing in between, he's Catholic. And my third best friend (Capricorns always have three very good friends) is the ever-faithful Nigel, who bans me during the week on account of my being an evil influence.
I have this Saturday night reserved for his birthday, and hopefully - this being a very rural Saturday night indeed - some of the edge of this rough culture will be softened then.
Why the blather? - ack, it was just a little episode earlier tonight, standing in a queue at the garage waiting to pay a fiver for the half-litre of petrol I'd just spooned into my mother's car, and someone drop-kicked me directly behind the knees. Obviously aiming for that spot that makes you crumple and fall over, but thankfully he missed. Just some guy I vaguely know. 'Orl right girl? You been away?'
Yeah, I been away alright, and I wish to God I still was.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Monday, March 21, 2005
Bravado in the Mid-Counties
So I'm home, and it's as though I never went away - certainly nobody seems to have noticed I left at all.
Tonight there was a bully in the house, who - once he had a few beers behind him - made a big point of telling me that nobody he knows likes me.
I turned to the next person to me (who doesn't know me well) and said loudly, 'Hey, that's just one more reason not to want to be here.'
Bad move.
She assumed that I meant I didn't like being home because nobody likes me here. Whereas what I was trying to say was more along the lines of, I can't think of another place on this planet where playground bullying is tolerated in adult spaces...
It didn't cheer me a great deal when Dave (the landlord) came back into the room, heard what had occurred during his absence, and tried to fix things by asserting that he likes me. That was not the issue, Dave...
I'm homesick for Israel already.
Tonight there was a bully in the house, who - once he had a few beers behind him - made a big point of telling me that nobody he knows likes me.
I turned to the next person to me (who doesn't know me well) and said loudly, 'Hey, that's just one more reason not to want to be here.'
Bad move.
She assumed that I meant I didn't like being home because nobody likes me here. Whereas what I was trying to say was more along the lines of, I can't think of another place on this planet where playground bullying is tolerated in adult spaces...
It didn't cheer me a great deal when Dave (the landlord) came back into the room, heard what had occurred during his absence, and tried to fix things by asserting that he likes me. That was not the issue, Dave...
I'm homesick for Israel already.
Friday, March 18, 2005
No hugs please, we're British
"In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be."
OK, that was the theory. But I wasn't - I ended up stressing out over going there at all, with full-on nightmares on a regular basis etc etc, most of which stemmed from seeing my friends in Mike's Place making world headlines a couple of years back. After some 5 months in Israel, where everyone says exactly what they think regardless of the consequences, I could see myself starting an international incident within minutes of crossing the border. Besides which, I started renovating my area of zend.com at the beginning of this month, and this exercise has left me with no time to mess around running from country to country every time I get a short visa. All things considered, I went illegal for the final Israeli fortnight and headed back to the UK, fuming quietly to myself over Israeli visa regulations.
I said goodbye to most of my Jerusalem friends on the 15th, and spent the 16th packing and cleaning. This took longer than anticipated, and I didn't make it to Ramat Gan in time to say goodbye to the guys and gals in the Zend office. It was around 9pm when I waved back sadly at Denise, my erstwhile landlady, flatmate and provider of cooked potatoes, and set off for Tel Aviv with what seemed to me a huge amount of luggage. I had to buy a suitcase from the markets off Agripas earlier in the day to accommodate the books, jumpers and jeans I bought in Israel - still everything didn't quite make it in, so I had a lot of tonnage to haul. And it really was a haul - there's no road near my pad in Jerusalem, it's strictly steps (Ha Madragot), and it took over half an hour to find myself a taxi because I took the steps downhill rather than attempt to go up. Still, I was (eventually) glad I'd done as I did - Ariel Sharon drove by as we queued at the Bezalel traffic lights, which seemed a fitting farewell from Jerusalem to me.
Erm - make that 'seven cars, one of which contained a girl with a megaphone, all of which contained security men with guns, three of which had darkened windows, one of which may have contained Ariel Sharon'. The rest of us mere mortals in the queue had to pull over onto the pavement as the big man passed by.
Tel Aviv... ah, that was so sad and so sweet. 'Why are you going home?' 'Israel doesn't want me any more.' 'But they never asked us!' (Alan).
So I hugged Gal, and Sarah, and Alan, and the guy who plays the keyboard so beautifully, and Josh, whose birthday it was, and Jasmin, who is not having a Good Time, and Emma, and Yattir, and the guy who sells incense (who handed me a bunch especially for Nigel, 'The King'), and Canadian Dave, and Sammy, and Barry, and Assaf - and the ever-lovely Yariv, who came an extra 5 miles just to say goodbye. All too soon I had to leave, and sober up in the 3am taxi to the airport.
The Zend letter probably saved me a strip-search, and Gal a 5am phone call, but I still got the full two-hour interrogation. 'You don't have much luggage.' (I don't?) 'What did you bring when you came here?' 'My rucksack, my laptop, and a carrier bag.' 'Where is the carrier bag now?' 'Huh?' I found a carrier bag to show. 'This is a carrier bag.' 'Ah...' the security guy got the giggles, thankfully, and the interrogation was much easier from then on.
So - home, via Cyprus, and a guy named Richard who chain-smoked alongside me in Larnaca Airport for 3 hours happened to be driving to Huntingdon from Heathrow Airport. Basically he was passing my area, so I asked for (and was given) a lift to Stevenage, where I could catch a bus home - or at least, to Hitchin Station, which is the next best thing, as I actually live some 5 miles up the road from there. By the time the bus came I'd reconsidered, and asked for a ticket to the town centre instead. 'Hitchin Town Centre? But you live in Baldock, don't you?' asked the driver.
Yep, that's home alright...
I went into the Red Hart, phoned Nigel and asked him to pick me up when he could, touched my very-ex-partner Floyd's plaque in a 'hi I'm back' kinda way, realised I was out of tune, and settled down amongst my luggage to get re-conditioned into Englishness. By the time Nigel arrived to pick up his incense sticks, duty-free cigarettes and me, there was a band going through a sound-check, so we shouted greetings to one another over the strains of 'I don't need no fuckin' leadAH!' (I guess they don't know any Beatles covers.) We planned our evening - it being St Paddy's night and all that - and drove over to Baldock in his new sports car, the one with a trunk the size of a lady's handbag.
Nigel having spent Christmas week in Tel Aviv with me, he was very aware of the strangenesses of rural England, and did his best to mitigate the culture clash. We did a minor pub crawl around Baldock until we found some Irish people, drank a Guinness with them, then went for a traditional English dinner - Chicken Dansak, Aloo Gobi, Mushroom Pilau and Peshwari Naan - before rounding off the (for me) 40-hour day with a glass of red wine and grateful unconsciousness.
OK, that was the theory. But I wasn't - I ended up stressing out over going there at all, with full-on nightmares on a regular basis etc etc, most of which stemmed from seeing my friends in Mike's Place making world headlines a couple of years back. After some 5 months in Israel, where everyone says exactly what they think regardless of the consequences, I could see myself starting an international incident within minutes of crossing the border. Besides which, I started renovating my area of zend.com at the beginning of this month, and this exercise has left me with no time to mess around running from country to country every time I get a short visa. All things considered, I went illegal for the final Israeli fortnight and headed back to the UK, fuming quietly to myself over Israeli visa regulations.
I said goodbye to most of my Jerusalem friends on the 15th, and spent the 16th packing and cleaning. This took longer than anticipated, and I didn't make it to Ramat Gan in time to say goodbye to the guys and gals in the Zend office. It was around 9pm when I waved back sadly at Denise, my erstwhile landlady, flatmate and provider of cooked potatoes, and set off for Tel Aviv with what seemed to me a huge amount of luggage. I had to buy a suitcase from the markets off Agripas earlier in the day to accommodate the books, jumpers and jeans I bought in Israel - still everything didn't quite make it in, so I had a lot of tonnage to haul. And it really was a haul - there's no road near my pad in Jerusalem, it's strictly steps (Ha Madragot), and it took over half an hour to find myself a taxi because I took the steps downhill rather than attempt to go up. Still, I was (eventually) glad I'd done as I did - Ariel Sharon drove by as we queued at the Bezalel traffic lights, which seemed a fitting farewell from Jerusalem to me.
Erm - make that 'seven cars, one of which contained a girl with a megaphone, all of which contained security men with guns, three of which had darkened windows, one of which may have contained Ariel Sharon'. The rest of us mere mortals in the queue had to pull over onto the pavement as the big man passed by.
Tel Aviv... ah, that was so sad and so sweet. 'Why are you going home?' 'Israel doesn't want me any more.' 'But they never asked us!' (Alan).
So I hugged Gal, and Sarah, and Alan, and the guy who plays the keyboard so beautifully, and Josh, whose birthday it was, and Jasmin, who is not having a Good Time, and Emma, and Yattir, and the guy who sells incense (who handed me a bunch especially for Nigel, 'The King'), and Canadian Dave, and Sammy, and Barry, and Assaf - and the ever-lovely Yariv, who came an extra 5 miles just to say goodbye. All too soon I had to leave, and sober up in the 3am taxi to the airport.
The Zend letter probably saved me a strip-search, and Gal a 5am phone call, but I still got the full two-hour interrogation. 'You don't have much luggage.' (I don't?) 'What did you bring when you came here?' 'My rucksack, my laptop, and a carrier bag.' 'Where is the carrier bag now?' 'Huh?' I found a carrier bag to show. 'This is a carrier bag.' 'Ah...' the security guy got the giggles, thankfully, and the interrogation was much easier from then on.
So - home, via Cyprus, and a guy named Richard who chain-smoked alongside me in Larnaca Airport for 3 hours happened to be driving to Huntingdon from Heathrow Airport. Basically he was passing my area, so I asked for (and was given) a lift to Stevenage, where I could catch a bus home - or at least, to Hitchin Station, which is the next best thing, as I actually live some 5 miles up the road from there. By the time the bus came I'd reconsidered, and asked for a ticket to the town centre instead. 'Hitchin Town Centre? But you live in Baldock, don't you?' asked the driver.
Yep, that's home alright...
I went into the Red Hart, phoned Nigel and asked him to pick me up when he could, touched my very-ex-partner Floyd's plaque in a 'hi I'm back' kinda way, realised I was out of tune, and settled down amongst my luggage to get re-conditioned into Englishness. By the time Nigel arrived to pick up his incense sticks, duty-free cigarettes and me, there was a band going through a sound-check, so we shouted greetings to one another over the strains of 'I don't need no fuckin' leadAH!' (I guess they don't know any Beatles covers.) We planned our evening - it being St Paddy's night and all that - and drove over to Baldock in his new sports car, the one with a trunk the size of a lady's handbag.
Nigel having spent Christmas week in Tel Aviv with me, he was very aware of the strangenesses of rural England, and did his best to mitigate the culture clash. We did a minor pub crawl around Baldock until we found some Irish people, drank a Guinness with them, then went for a traditional English dinner - Chicken Dansak, Aloo Gobi, Mushroom Pilau and Peshwari Naan - before rounding off the (for me) 40-hour day with a glass of red wine and grateful unconsciousness.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Hebrew. The language of .... erm ... Hebrew speakers ...
I worked (not in a particularly productive way) today.
I should be in Jordan; there's a bit of a situation with my visa and I'm technically illegal here at present. But I dread leaving Israel. I never liked leaving Israel from the first time I came here, but it's worse when you're relying very heavily on the border security allowing you back into the country at all, and your entire life is based around that country for the next few weeks...
In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be.
So I went out to drown my sorrows, a little too late to catch Mike's in Jerusalem but in plenty of time for the Blue Hole. Where there was a discussion with the barmaid whose name I never caught, but she remembers mine and is always good company. I'm trying to learn Hebrew in between the waves of all-night coding and occasionally getting around to do the job I'm officially doing, but it doesn't work out too well - most of the people I've met across Israel speak English, it's a bit like being in the Netherlands in that respect. If everyone just spoke Hebrew I'd have had to learn enough to get by, but as things stand it's become a luxury item; it's not critical to my social or working life, and other things take precedence.
But there we are, and I'm trying to read a Paddy's Day promotion from Jameson, only part of which (the headline) is in English. The rest is in capitalized Hebrew, which I can read the way a bright 3-year-old can read. I still have less than a flying hope when it comes to cursive script... Anyways the girl with no name was laughing with me over my attempts, saying that she'd had similar problems when she made aliyah. Especially when she began working in bars.
The punchline:
'How would YOU write 'Southern Comfort' in Hebrew?'
a. 'sotern comfrt'?
b. 'sotorn comfrt'?
c. 'sozrn comfrt'?
A clue: if you chose 'c' you probably messed up.
I should be in Jordan; there's a bit of a situation with my visa and I'm technically illegal here at present. But I dread leaving Israel. I never liked leaving Israel from the first time I came here, but it's worse when you're relying very heavily on the border security allowing you back into the country at all, and your entire life is based around that country for the next few weeks...
In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be.
So I went out to drown my sorrows, a little too late to catch Mike's in Jerusalem but in plenty of time for the Blue Hole. Where there was a discussion with the barmaid whose name I never caught, but she remembers mine and is always good company. I'm trying to learn Hebrew in between the waves of all-night coding and occasionally getting around to do the job I'm officially doing, but it doesn't work out too well - most of the people I've met across Israel speak English, it's a bit like being in the Netherlands in that respect. If everyone just spoke Hebrew I'd have had to learn enough to get by, but as things stand it's become a luxury item; it's not critical to my social or working life, and other things take precedence.
But there we are, and I'm trying to read a Paddy's Day promotion from Jameson, only part of which (the headline) is in English. The rest is in capitalized Hebrew, which I can read the way a bright 3-year-old can read. I still have less than a flying hope when it comes to cursive script... Anyways the girl with no name was laughing with me over my attempts, saying that she'd had similar problems when she made aliyah. Especially when she began working in bars.
The punchline:
'How would YOU write 'Southern Comfort' in Hebrew?'
a. 'sotern comfrt'?
b. 'sotorn comfrt'?
c. 'sozrn comfrt'?
A clue: if you chose 'c' you probably messed up.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Sherutim (long distance version)
So I'm sitting on a bench in Tel Aviv Central bus station. It's 3am. I left Mike's Place at midnight because I needed to get home to Jerusalem fairly early, and if you daren't risk taxis (you have to speak fluent Hebrew in order to dissuade the cabbies here from charging you the Earth, Moon and planets to get from A to B) the only option after midnight is the sherutim.
The sherutim are a great plan that sometime gan awry. Some take 8 passengers, others take 12, but none of them take anyone anywhere until the minibus is full. And ours didn't fill.
At around 2am the sherut driver came by, canvassing. He wanted the six passengers already on board (I was counted as 'on board', having paid my 25 shekel fare already) to pay an extra 15 shekels to make up for the passengers we didn't have. I admitted to having a spare 15 shekels in my pocket, but pointed out that the rest of the passengers would (quite rightly) veto the whole idea - which, surely enough, they did.
By 2.30am there's a guy who used to be asleep on the bench, but has woken for long enough to share a cigarette with me and has now decided it's nicer to sleep with his head in my lap. There's a terribly obese guy (unusual in Israel) who has had to sit down and rest 3 times just walking from the local bus stop to the sherutim base - a matter of some 400 metres - and who dozes almost immediately he finds a real bench, knowing that his chances of reaching Haifa tonight are very slim indeedy. There's also a very young boy, a teenager, who is clutching a huge canvas under one arm. I asked to see the painting. It showed himself, screaming, and a dim effeminate ghost who was larger than he was. 'Who's the ghost?' 'My aunt.' 'I'm so sorry.' The intifada has a lot to answer for, whichever side you happen to be on and whatever way you view it.
By 3.30am the sherut driver had lost patience. He signalled me to join the rest of the passengers on the minibus and demanded that everyone on board pay whatever they could. I was totally bemused by this - it's a very un-Israeli attitude to take - but handed over an extra 20 sheks regardless. The yeshiva boys managed a few shekels above their fare, the Israeli Arabs in the back managed around the same, the American tourist feigned sleep. Then we drove around the corner and I found out what the problem was. There had never been any fuel in the sherut from the start; we sat in a filling station for a further 10 minutes while the driver counted out the price of a full tank of diesel in the single shekel coins given him by the yeshiva and the Arabs.
So - you get the picture. I'm not going to be someone who blogs PHP development. Sorry.
The sherutim are a great plan that sometime gan awry. Some take 8 passengers, others take 12, but none of them take anyone anywhere until the minibus is full. And ours didn't fill.
At around 2am the sherut driver came by, canvassing. He wanted the six passengers already on board (I was counted as 'on board', having paid my 25 shekel fare already) to pay an extra 15 shekels to make up for the passengers we didn't have. I admitted to having a spare 15 shekels in my pocket, but pointed out that the rest of the passengers would (quite rightly) veto the whole idea - which, surely enough, they did.
By 2.30am there's a guy who used to be asleep on the bench, but has woken for long enough to share a cigarette with me and has now decided it's nicer to sleep with his head in my lap. There's a terribly obese guy (unusual in Israel) who has had to sit down and rest 3 times just walking from the local bus stop to the sherutim base - a matter of some 400 metres - and who dozes almost immediately he finds a real bench, knowing that his chances of reaching Haifa tonight are very slim indeedy. There's also a very young boy, a teenager, who is clutching a huge canvas under one arm. I asked to see the painting. It showed himself, screaming, and a dim effeminate ghost who was larger than he was. 'Who's the ghost?' 'My aunt.' 'I'm so sorry.' The intifada has a lot to answer for, whichever side you happen to be on and whatever way you view it.
By 3.30am the sherut driver had lost patience. He signalled me to join the rest of the passengers on the minibus and demanded that everyone on board pay whatever they could. I was totally bemused by this - it's a very un-Israeli attitude to take - but handed over an extra 20 sheks regardless. The yeshiva boys managed a few shekels above their fare, the Israeli Arabs in the back managed around the same, the American tourist feigned sleep. Then we drove around the corner and I found out what the problem was. There had never been any fuel in the sherut from the start; we sat in a filling station for a further 10 minutes while the driver counted out the price of a full tank of diesel in the single shekel coins given him by the yeshiva and the Arabs.
So - you get the picture. I'm not going to be someone who blogs PHP development. Sorry.
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